Mannerism (Literary)

Mannerism denotes the transitional literary style that flourished between the High Renaissance and the Baroque, roughly from the 1520s to the early seventeenth century, prizing virtuosic technical display, elaborate conceits, artificiality and stylistic self-consciousness over the balanced naturalism of earlier Renaissance writing. Originating as a term borrowed from art history, where it describes painters such as Pontormo and El Greco working in a self-consciously sophisticated, elongated style, the term was extended to literature marked by ornate diction, strained wit and deliberate difficulty, seen in poets and prose writers across Italy, Spain and England in the late sixteenth century. It is distinct from Mannerism as an art-historical movement in painting and sculpture, though the two share a common name, era and aesthetic impulse toward stylization and artifice over naturalism.